Todd Biske: Outside the Box

The latest ZapFlash from ZapThink discussed what the real barrier to SOA Adoption is, and Ron points directly at IT as the source. He states:

What ZapThink is finding is that the primary barriers to SOA adoption do not come from business management … but rather from within the IT organization … too many people in the IT organization conceive SOA as a technology concept only, and as such think of SOA as just a set of technologies and infrastructure for exposing, securing, running, and managing Services.

As always, Ron walks the line of controversy with this entry. In reading the article, there’s certainly not much you can argue about as far as some generalizations of IT go. I have seen organizations that are clearly burying SOA within IT, thinking of it as just another application development technology, just as Ron describes it. On some recent work, I recently had created a slide that showed a picture of a bunch of monolithic applications and then breaking apart those monolithic into groups of services. Some may think that this is doing SOA. I’d argue that if that’s the only thing that changes, you’re probably not. In most organizations, there does need to be some fundamental changes in the way IT operates. That being said, what causes that behavior in the first place? Ron made one statement in the above quote, which I intentionally left out at first. Here’s the full text:

What ZapThink is finding is that the primary barriers to SOA adoption do not come from business management, which by and large realize the benefits of an agile, reusable, and loosely coupled architecture (even if they don’t call it that), but rather from within the IT organization …

The italicized text is what really surprised me. Previously, I had a post that said that the organizations that are claiming success with SOA probably had a culture that already had IT and business working together at a higher level. Therefore, I would expect that a business that realizes “the benefits of an agile, reusable, and loosely coupled architecture (even if they don’t call it that)” has a mature Enterprise Architecture practice, with IT having a seat at the strategic planning table. If that’s the case, it would be even more surprising to find a huge gap between IT management and architecture and the actual IT execution. That tells me that some CIO, CTO, or Chief Architect is not doing their job very well.

In organizations where SOA is buried within IT, I would have expected that IT is buried within the organization. So, while all the problems that Ron describes would be accurate, the cultural issues actually ripple beyond IT. Those cultural barriers are a huge barrier, and it’s not just an IT problem, it’s a problem for IT and the business. If the business doesn’t think strategically, which you’d think would be required in order to understand the benefits of an agile, reusable, and loosely coupled architecture, how can can IT be expected to think strategically?

My pragmatic nature tells me that there are surely cases where IT is the problem. There are also cases where the business is the problem. There are cases where both groups are the problem, and there are cases where everything is well. The only real problem is when no one recognizes the problems that exist. It’s always better to deal with your own problems before you begin finger pointing at another organization. IT can be a barrier, and Ron’s article does call out some common problems so it’s definitely worth the read. Truth be told, however, if you’re struggling with your SOA efforts, odds are that there are things that need to be fixed both within the business and IT. Don’t try to boil the ocean, but rather, understand where you’re at, the things you need to work on, and set a realistic approach in motion for doing so.

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